Thursday, January 28, 2010

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 8

Dandling Man is Bellow’s first novel which follows the above mentioned trajectory. The novel is presented as the journal of a young Canadian, Joseph, who is waiting for his induction into the U.S. army in 1942, and who “suffers from a feeling of strangeness of not quite belonging to the world, of lying under a cloud and looking up at it “(DM, 24). This novel established Bellow as a spokesman for the generation of his age during the war. In viewing Dangling Man. Edmund Wilson stated that it was one of the most honest pieces of “testimony on the psychology of a whole generation who have grown up during the depression and the war” (NY, 78-81). The novel as a representative document captures the feelings of men awaiting induction — a symbol of forthcoming disaster. Moreover, it seriously discusses the meaning of identity in the modern worlds touching upon the nature of good and evil, and the possibility of fulfillment. Its journal form immediately reveals Joseph’s isolation and his dangling condition. Commenting on the tons and the style, David Galloway speaks highly of it: “it also stands as a landmark of modern fiction” (MFS, 17).

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 7

Existentialism and Freudian psychoanalytic theory provide explanations of alienation. Basically, the existentialist view point is a sense of meaninglessness and lawlessness in the outer world. As soon as the man is given birth, he is thrown into an absurd, cruel situation and has to fight for his being. Coldness, hunger, illness, accident are hidden beside him all the time and ready to gulp down his life. So after the baby has left his mother’s body, he is immediately driven into never-ending anxiety. When he begins to understand things, someone else will strive to control him. Father wants him to be his ideal son. Teacher wants him to be a student by his standard, while wife, an appropriate husband by her taste. Many of us grow up by others’ standard, ideal, taste. Serving others, we never know our true qualities. Only self-consciousness and determination not to be directed by others can obtain our own existence. Then through free choice can he create his own essence. Society engulfs self and alienates man as tool. Why are men forever hostile to each other?   Existentialism provides the answer: deficiency is the perpetual environment of human beings while each one tries to fulfill his own desire. This situation leads inevitably to scrambling among human beings. The state of alienation in which men are hostile to each other is absolute, eternal.

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 6

In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx makes a brilliant exposition on alienation under private ownership of means of production. What he concentrates on is alienated labor. Marx calls attention to four aspects of alienation in capitalistic society. First, man is alienated from the products of his activity or work. Man’s labor is embodied, in an object and is bought and sold. The object is appropriated, owned by someone else and stands as an “alien being” to the worker.   As a result, the more the objects produced by the worker, the stronger the hostile power is, the poorer the worker becomes. This is the alienation of object. Secondly the worker is alienated from his work since he sells his labor to others and is compelled to work for someone else. As a consequence, the worker feels like a human being only during his leisure hours. In this sense, the worker does not belong to himself but to someone else. This is also the worker’s self-alienation.

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 5

The modern period is a complex age, and many philosophical theories have come into being. In the 1950’s, existentialism entered American society. Greatly influenced by existentialism, Bellow accepts mainly the humanistic aspects of the theory that celebrate human being’s free choice. Basically the existentialist assumes that existence precedes essence. The existentialist’s view point is a sense of meaninglessness in the outer world. This meaninglessness produces a discomfort, an anxiety, a loneliness in the face of an absurd world. Human beings are totally free but also wholly responsible for what they make of themselves. This freedom and responsibility are to resume human being’s dignity. That is why Bellow’s depiction of man is subangelic. On the one hand, society is rendered in an almost unchanging, indifferent and powerful background against which his protagonists are seen impotent alienated, burdened. On the other hand, the protagonists at least have “the power to ‘overcome ignominy’ and to ‘complete his own life. Here Bellow means that any depiction of man should grant him the power to rise above the indignities of complete subjection to unseen and unknown forces, to give him a nature not totally in the chains of a miserable naturalistic impotency” (SB, 4) . Bellow insists that we are not gods, not beasts, but savages of somewhat damaged but not extinguished nobility. He wants to consider man as a little lower than the angels, not as insignificant or anonymous. Man actually has the power to complete his own life by his validity and his involvement in society. It is obvious, then, that the Jewish and the American experiences, commingling in the Americas-Jewish urban intelligentsia, are the traditions behind Bell1ow’s writing which affirm human dignity and possibility. He is both American and Jewish, manifesting both alienation and accommodation.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 4

As a Jewish American novelist, Bellow’s Jewish experience and Jewish cultural tradition, lay great influence on him, and find expressions in his fiction writings. On the one hand, there is evidence of this Jewish background in his work. The Victim deals largely with the Jewish sense of persecution and the Jewish yearning for brotherhood; the early scenes of Augie March portray the lives of the Urban Jewish poor and lower middle class; the characters in Seize the Day are recognizable New York Jewish types; and in Herzog there is the portrayal of a Jewish childhood and an emphasis on Jewish family feeling. Simply speaking, Bellow’s comedy, intellectualism, moral preoccupation and alienation, his concern with the family and with rough Eastern European immigrants, his obsession with the past and with the dangler of an alien world, his emphasis on purity, his sense of the unreality of this world as opposed to God’s — all of these elements bespeak his deep Jewish concern. On the other hand, Bellow’s Jewish background, to some degree, determines his belief in man and in the possibility of meaningful existence. Bellow is not only a part of the affirmative Jewish tradition; he is self-consciously a part of it. Bellow has said that the “Jewish feeling” within him rejects the belief that man is finished and that the world must be destroyed. It is a yea-saying that Bellow longs to express in his work. The open concern with goodness pervades Bellow’s work. Joseph believes his only talent is for goodness; As a learns what goodness means; Tommy longs to be good. What is required is not certain actions but a goodness of heart, an openness to others. The strong family ties and the sense of community are responsible for the fact that the solitary protagonists of Bellow’s fictions discover a harmonious existence of means of love or putting down the burdens of the past, or by overcoming their self-imposed guilty feeling.

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 3

Bellow’s fiction contains three interwoven contractions. Firstly, Bellow shows a strong opposition to the cultural nihilism of the twentieth century: to Dadaism, to the Waste Lander’s ideology, and to the denigration of human life in modern society. Yet Bellow himself is essentially a depressive novelist and almost all his protagonists are horrified by the emptiness of modern society. Secondly, Bellow firmly denies the tradition of alienation in modern literature, and his works place a special stress on the value of brotherhood and human community; yet his protagonists are all masochists and alienated. Lastly, Bellow endlessly attacks the degradation of individual worth and never wavers in his confidence in the individual’s salvation, yet he contradictorily relinquishes individuality in all his novels.

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 2

Saul Bellow was born on 10 July 1915 in Montreal, Canada, two years after his parents had immigrated there from Russia. His father was a daring and not always successful businessman who in Russia had imported Egyptian onions and in the New World attempted several often unconventional businesses. His mother was an ambitious woman, who wished her son to become a Talmudic Scholar. Bellow grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal and was “generally preoccupied with what went on in it and watched from the stairs and windows” (DALB, 82). He attended cheder, where he learned Hebrew thoroughly and at home he spoke Yiddish. His Yiddish is fluent. He has translated a number of stories, including Singer’s Gimpel the Fool, and he has written an introduction to, a collection of Jewish short stories.

A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 1

Saul Bellow (1915—2005) is one of the most prolific and energetic writers in the contemporary literary world. Be is not simply a novelist, hut an essayist, a short-story writer, a playwright, a translator and an editor. Throughout his forty-year’s writing career he has published a dozen novels and novelette, dozens of short stories, hundreds of essays, articles and translations, a full-length play, and a biography. Nobel laureate and winner of numerous prestigious fiction awards, Bellow has commanded series attention from a large range of reviews and critics at home and abroad for more than forty years. By now he is possibly the most written about novelist of the contemporary American period.
As a novelist, Saul Bellow considers it his duty to attempt to work out solutions to distraction and cope with confusion of facts, idea and emotion of everyday life. As an essayist, he shows his concern for human integrity and explores the problem of human identity assailed by physical, psychological and intellectual distractions in a selfish materialistic.

PROFILE OF SAUL BELLOW

SAUL BELLOW, who died on 5 April 2005, at the age of eighty-nine, at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976, and received the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, and the National Medal of Arts. No American writer has garnered more honors.
He was born in Lachine, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal, on 10 June or perhaps in July 1915, the former date, however, being the one on which Mr. Bellow usually celebrated his birthday. His family-the parents and three older children-had emigrated from Russia to Canada only two years earlier. In 1924 the Bellows moved to Chicago.

SAUL BELLOW: AN APPRECIATION

It was the fall of 1975. The cover story in that week's Newsweek was about Saul Bellow, "America's Master Novelist." I had to find out who this master novelist was. Humboldt's Gift was Bellow's latest novel, the one being celebrated in that issue. Reading it was one of my first introductions to great literature. Many other experiences would follow, but Bellow, along with Thomas Wolfe, was there first.
Few American writers have enjoyed so much acclaim for such an extensive period of time as Saul Bellow (1915-2005). In his long and productive career, Bellow won a Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards and in 1976, the Nobel Prize. The post World War II era was marked by a string of ambitious novelists, all striving to reach the heights scaled by Faulkner and Hemingway. Of that generation, Bellow was the only Nobelist. But the prize was not a "ticket to one's own funeral" (as TS. Eliot dryly observed). Bellow was productive for a good quarter of a century following that honor.

A TRIBUTE TO SAUL BELLOW

"I AM AN AMERICAN, Chicago born-Chicago, that somber city-and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent . . ." Many readers and writers have been quoting that sentence, the opening lines of the novel The Adventures of Augic March, now that its creator, Saul Bellow, has left us to our own devices. Since Melville opened Moby Dick with that first great line of American fiction"Call me Ishmael"-and Mark Twain opened The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in his own special way, no one but Bellow has fashioned an opening as memorable and as powerful-and as important-as this line that sprung open the padlock of American art language by using the pick of freestyle diction, this line that announced that American writers didn't have to glove their knuckles anymore when they knocked at the door. Bellow published The Adventures of Augie March in 1953. It won him national recognition, a National Book Award, a major place at the American literary table. "The book just came to me," he wrote. "All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it." Bellow had prepared for this one, though. His first novel, Dangling Man, came out almost a decade before. The Victim, his second novel, published in 1947, opened with a line that was almost as memorable, if more conventional: "On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok." And then the rest of that novel's opening paragraph, as beautiful as anything by any of his predecessors or peers in the sweltering art of the novel: "The whole continent seems to have moved from its place and slid nearer the equator, the bitter gray Atlantic to have become green and tropical, and the people, thronging the streets, barbaric fellahin among the stupendous monuments of their mystery, the lights of which, a dazing profusion, climb upward endlessly into the heat of the sky." If Bellow hadn't upped the ante with the opening of Angie Mardi, this passage alone would have been a great opening to remember him by: the allusion to a South Asian city, the geographical breadth of the imagery, the transformation of colors, gray to green and tropical, New York bustle presented in terms of the Arab street.